‘It Makes You Think About Your Own Life’ : Death: The public administrator can learn a lot about people from what they leave behind--how they lived, their joys . . . and their families.

Sandy West, a call girl-turned-millionaire, had a peculiar request: to be buried wearing her favorite nightgown in the driver’s seat of her red Ferrari.

After she died of a drug overdose in 1977, it would take a crane to hoist the sports-car-size concrete casket into a six-plot-wide grave and $26,000 to carry out her wishes.

Orchestrating the funeral were Lonnie Armstead and his staff at L.A. County’s public administrator’s office. Unknown to many, these 32 public officials typically handle money matters for people who die alone.

They confiscate and liquidate the property of those without heirs, generating about $1 million for the state general fund. And in cases in which heirs are feuding over an inheritance, the public administrator acts as the decedent’s guardian.

By sifting through diaries, letters, tax returns and bank statements, the administrators determine the value of someone’s life and resolve any financial issues.

“We see people through their property,” Armstead says. “They’re not dead to us. We see the pain in their life, the joys. By the end of the investigation, we feel like we know the person intimately.”

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In his 23 years as a public administrator, Armstead has come across millionaires who lived in poverty and bitter heirs who hoarded riches.

An Army surplus store owner, for example, left $300,000 to his six children. But when they began fighting over assets excluded from the will, a public administrator intervened to sniff out and inventory all of his worldly goods for distribution.

Although the man lived in a rundown Long Beach home, he had squirreled away a fortune in safes stored at his children’s homes and in remote areas. Administrators unearthed $1.5 million in gold and silver bars in a bolted safe buried near Riverside. But even with that treasure and more to divvy up, the heirs’ squabbling continued.

“The family was so picky that they complained about things like a $2 straw and a bag of plastic forks that weren’t inventoried,” Armstead says.

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Of the 400 to 500 cases his office oversees every month, a few involve public figures, such as Howard Hughes or Herve Villechaize of “Fantasy Island.” But the case of the call girl, Armstead says, was one of his most extraordinary and complex.

Officials conservatively estimated West’s worth at $12 million. Born into poverty, she survived as a young woman through “low-level” prostitution, rising to become a Beverly Hills call girl who earned up to $500 a night. By 28, she had married into a multimillion-dollar Texas fortune, garnering a $300,000-a-month allowance. She once rented out the former Perinos Restaurant, a then-exclusive Hollywood spot, for a private $33,000 lunch with her dog, Armstead says.

West left behind two wills and six feuding potential heirs.

After 10 years of legal wrangling, the public administrator sold her assets--everything from a $1-million stamp, wine and jewelry collections to exotic dogs to her Beverly Hills estate--paid her creditors and divided the remaining funds among the heirs.

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Other cases have been pending for more than 30 years.

The public administrator’s office generally steps in either when property goes unclaimed or when the probate court assigns it to mediate among heirs. Deputy administrators must meticulously comb each room in a home or business, identifying and recording each item and tagging it with a price. A trucking company moves in next, packaging and sealing all materials into 4-by-8-foot wooden crates for storage in a 75,000-square-foot Pico Rivera warehouse.

“We see a large variety of property--just as wide as the population we deal with,” Armstead says. “One day we’ll find a Skid Row derelict in a $150 apartment room. The next day it’s an international wheeler dealer.

“There are all kinds of stories of people and what they do. It’s amazing how people live.”

He recalls the case of the millionaire stock investor who was found dead in a Skid Row hotel room. He had eaten the same meals in the same restaurant for 20 years, Armstead says, and had stuffed rolls of money inside the room’s walls.

And who could forget the bird man, a recluse whose 1,000-bird collection of canaries and parakeets left an inch-thick layer of waste throughout the home.

Such deaths often leave unanswered questions, Armstead explains. Once auctioned off, that which once defined a person’s identity quietly dissipates.

“Every time people think of death, it’s usually a bad thing,” says David Nelson, general manager of Nationwide Auction House, the contractor for the public administrator’s office.

“It’s kind of disheartening to think sometimes that somebody’s possessions for 80 years all have to be sold. It makes you think about your own life.”